The Psalms belong fundamentally to the category of poetry, and this literary nature shapes how they must be read, particularly when identifying thanksgiving psalms. Because the Bible contains extensive poetry, understanding its conventions is essential to extracting its full meaning, and the Psalms exemplify this need vividly. Unlike prose, poetry expresses gratitude through imaginative, metaphorical, and colorful language rather than plain or pedestrian statements. A thanksgiving psalm will rarely contain a simple, direct expression like "Dear God, thank You for what You did," resembling something akin to a greeting card. Instead, gratitude is conveyed through dramatic imagery, high language, and elaborate description, so much so that the presence of thanks can be easily obscured by the sheer weight of poetic expression surrounding it. This poetic quality explains why scholars disagree on which psalms qualify as thanksgiving psalms. Since actual words for "thanks" or "gratitude" are often absent, thanksgiving is frequently expressed instead through praise, blessing, or extolling God, phrases like "I will praise Thee" or "I will bless Thee, Most High" substituting for explicit thanks. Psalm 18 demonstrates this pattern powerfully: across fifty verses, the only explicit word of thanksgiving appears in verse forty-nine, yet the entire psalm is built through poetic exaggeration, earthquakes, smoke, fire, cherubim, and cosmic upheaval, to portray God's eagerness to rescue David. Such imagery is not meant to be read as literal history but as poetic amplification, emphasizing that God moved heaven and earth on David's behalf because of divine delight in him. This poetic sensibility connects directly to the Hebrew mindset, which favors concrete action over verbal expression. Hebrew as a language is grounded in physical and natural imagery rather than abstract mental concepts, and this concreteness reinforces why thanksgiving in the Psalms often manifests as sacrifice, vow, or obedience rather than spoken gratitude. Hannah's prayer in First Samuel illustrates this same principle outside the Psalter: her prayer of thanksgiving contains no word of thanks at all, yet her actions, offering a bull and dedicating her son to lifelong service, embody profound gratitude far beyond words. Ultimately, recognizing the Psalms as poetry safeguards against superficial or overly literal reading. It teaches that thanksgiving may be woven into praise, blessing, or vivid metaphorical description rather than isolated in explicit vocabulary, and it reveals how David's poetic reflections on a lifetime of highs and lows testify to God's constant presence, expressed not through plain declaration but through the rich, imaginative language characteristic of Hebrew sacred poetry.